Someone had stood in a living room and watched their own father lie on the floor and had decided that a notebook mattered more than his life.

I had spent three years believing the wrong person was the monster.

I was beginning to understand what an actual one looked like, and that she had been at my holiday table the whole time, laughing, calling me brother.

That was the hardest recalibration of all, harder even than the guilt.

For three years I had believed monstrousness was a thing you could see — that a person capable of real cruelty would give themselves away, would carry it in their face, would feel wrong to be near.

Lucy, who had done nothing, had been easy for me to recast as the villain precisely because villainy was supposed to be visible and I had decided I could see it in her.